Dearly Devoted Dexter

CHAPTER 12

DEBORAH DROVE US SOUTH ON DIXIE HIGHWAY. YES, I did say “us.” To my surprise, I had become a valuable member of the Justice League and was informed that I was being honored with the opportunity to put my irreplaceable self in harm’s way. Although I was far from delighted, one small incident almost made it worthwhile.

As we stood outside the restaurant waiting for the valet to bring Deborah’s car, Chutsky had quietly muttered, “What the fuck…?” and sauntered away down the driveway. I watched him as he walked out to the gate and gestured at a maroon Taurus that had casually parked there beside a palm tree. Debs glared at me as if it was all my fault, and we both watched Chutsky wave at the driver’s window, which rolled down to reveal, of course, the ever-watchful Sergeant Doakes. Chutsky leaned on the gate and said something to Doakes, who glanced up the drive to me, shook his head, and then rolled up the window and drove away.

Chutsky didn’t say anything when he rejoined us. But he did look at me a little differently before he climbed into the front seat of the car.

It was a twenty-minute drive south to where Quail Roost Drive runs east and west and crosses Dixie Highway, right beside a mall. Just two blocks in, a series of side streets leads into a quiet, working-class neighborhood made up of small, mostly neat houses, usually with two cars in the short driveway and several bicycles scattered across the lawn.

One of these streets bent to the left and led to a cul-de-sac, and it was here, at the end of the street, that we found the house, a pale yellow stucco dwelling with an overgrown yard. There was a battered gray van in the driveway with dark red lettering that said HERMANOS CRUZ LIMPIADORES-Cruz Brothers Cleaners.

Debs drove around the cul-de-sac and up the street about half a block to a house with half a dozen cars parked out front and on the lawn, and loud rap music coming from inside. Debs turned our car around to face our target and parked under a tree. “What do you think?” she said.

Chutsky just shrugged. “Uh-huh. Could be,” he said. “Let’s watch a while.” And that was the entire extent of our sparkling conversation for a good half hour. Hardly enough to keep the mind alive, and I found myself mentally drifting off to the small shelf in my apartment, where a little rosewood box holds a number of glass slides, the kind you place under a microscope. Each slide contained a single drop of blood-very well-dried blood, of course. I wouldn’t have the nasty stuff in my home otherwise. Forty tiny windows into my shadow other self. One drop from each of my small adventures. There had been First Nurse, so long ago, who had killed her patients by careful overdose, under the guise of easing pain. And the very next slot in the box, the high-school shop teacher who strangled nurses. Wonderful contrast, and I do love irony.

So many memories, and as I stroked each one it made me even more eager to make a new one, number forty-one, even though number forty, MacGregor, was hardly dry. But because it was connected to my next project, and therefore felt incomplete, I was anxious to get on with it. As soon as I could be sure about Reiker and then find some way-

I sat up. Perhaps the rich dessert had clogged my cranial arteries, but I had temporarily forgotten Deborah’s bribe. “Deborah?” I said.

She glanced back at me, with a small frown of concentration on her face. “What.”

“Here we are,” I said.

“No shit.”

“None whatsoever. A complete lack of shit, in fact-and all thanks to my mighty mental labors. Wasn’t there some mention of a few things you were going to tell me?”

She glanced at Chutsky. He was staring straight ahead, still wearing the sunglasses, which did not blink. “Yeah, all right,” she said. “In the army Doakes was in Special Forces.”

“I know that. It’s in his personnel file.”

“What you don’t know, buddy,” said Kyle without moving, “is that there’s a dark side to Special Forces. Doakes was with them.” A very tiny smile creased his face for just a second, so small and sudden I might have imagined it. “Once you go over to the dark side, it’s forever. You can’t go back.”

I watched Chutsky sit completely motionless for a moment longer and then I looked at Debs. She shrugged. “Doakes was a shooter,” she said. “The army let the guys in El Salvador borrow him, and he killed people for them.”

“Have gun will travel,” Chutsky said.

“That explains his personality,” I said, thinking it also explained a great deal more, like the echo I heard coming from his direction when my Dark Passenger called out.

“You have to understand how it was,” Chutsky said. It was a little eerie to hear his voice coming from a completely unmoving and unemotional face, as if the voice was really coming from a tape recorder somebody had put in his body. “We believed we were saving the world. Giving up our lives and any hope for something normal and decent, for the cause. Turns out we were just selling our souls. Me, Doakes…”

“And Dr. Danco,” I said.

“And Dr. Danco.” Chutsky sighed and finally moved, turning his head briefly to Deborah, then looking forward again. He shook his head, and the movement seemed so large and theatrical after his stillness that I felt like applauding. “Dr. Danco started out as an idealist, just like the rest of us. He found out in med school there was something missing inside him and he could do things to people and not feel any empathy at all. Nothing at all. It’s a lot rarer than you think.”

“Oh, I’m sure it is,” I said, and Debs glared at me.

“Danco loved his country,” Chutsky went on. “So he switched to the dark side, too. On purpose, to use this talent. And in El Salvador it… blossomed. He would take somebody that we brought him and just-” He paused and took a breath, blew it out slowly. “Shit. You saw what he does.”

“Very original,” I said. “Creative.”

Chutsky gave a small snort of laughter that had no humor in it. “Creative. Yeah. You could say that.” Chutsky swung his head slowly left, right, left. “I said it didn’t bother him to do that stuff-in El Salvador he got to like it. He’d sit in on the interrogation and ask personal questions. Then when he started to- He’d call the person by name, like he was a dentist or something, and say, ‘Let’s try number five,’ or number seven, whatever. Like there were all these different patterns.”

“What kind of patterns?” I asked. It seemed like a perfectly natural question, showing polite interest and keeping the conversation moving. But Chutsky swiveled around in his seat and looked at me as if I was something that might require a whole bottle of floor cleaner.

“This is funny to you,” he said.

“Not yet,” I said.

He stared at me for what seemed like an awfully long time; then he just shook his head and faced front again. “I don’t know what kind of pattern, buddy. Never asked. Sorry. Probably something to do with what he cut off first. Just something to keep himself amused. And he’d talk to them, call them by name, show them what he was doing.” Chutsky shuddered. “Somehow that made it worse. You should have seen what it did to the other side.”

“How about what it did to you?” Deborah demanded.

He let his chin fall forward to his chest, then straightened again. “That too,” he said. “Anyway, something finally changed at home, the politics, back in the Pentagon. New regime and all that, and they didn’t want anything to do with what we had been doing down there. So very quietly the word came that Dr. Danco might buy us a small piece of political accommodation with the other side if we delivered him.”

“You gave up your own guy to be killed?” I asked. It hardly seemed fair-I mean, I may be untroubled by a sense of morals, but at least I play by the rules.

Kyle was silent for a long moment. “I told you we sold our souls, buddy,” he said at last. He smiled again, a little longer this time. “Yeah, we set him up and they took him down.”

“But he’s not dead,” Deborah said, always practical.

“We got scammed,” Chutsky said. “The Cubans took him.”

“What Cubans?” Deborah asked. “You said El Salvador.”

“Back in the day, anytime there was trouble in the Americas, there were Cubans. They were propping up one side, just like we did with the other. And they wanted our doctor. I told you, he was special. So they took him, tried to turn him. Put him in the Isle of Pines.”

“Is that a resort?” I asked.

Chutsky gave a single small snort of a laugh. “The last resort, maybe. Isle of Pines is one of the hardest prisons in the world. Dr. Danco spent some real quality time there. They let him know his own side had given him up, and they really put him through it. And a few years later, one of our guys gets caught and turns up like that. No arms or legs, the whole deal. Danco is working for them. And now-” He shrugged. “Either they turned him loose or he skipped. Doesn’t matter which. He knows who set him up, and he’s got a list.”

“Is your name on that list?” Deborah demanded.

“Maybe,” Chutsky said.

“Is Doakes’s?” I asked. After all, I can be practical, too.

“Maybe,” he said again, which didn’t seem very helpful. All the stuff about Danco was interesting, of course, but I was here for a reason. “Anyway,” Chutsky said, “that’s what we’re up against.”

Nobody seemed to have much to say to that, including me. I turned the things I’d heard from side to side, looking for some way to make it help me with my Doakes infestation. I will admit that I saw nothing at the moment, which was humbling. But I did seem to have a slightly better understanding of dear Dr. Danco. So he was empty inside, too, was he? A raptor in sheep’s clothing. And he, too, had found a way to use his talent for the greater good-again, just like dear old Dexter. But now he had come off the rails, and he began to seem a little bit more like just another predator, no matter the unsettling direction his technique took him.

And oddly enough, with that insight, another thought nosed its way back into the bubbling cauldron of Dexter’s dark underbrain. It had been a passing fancy before-now it began to seem like a very good idea. Why not find Dr. Danco myself, and do a little Dark Dance with him? He was a predator gone bad, just like all the others on my list. No one, not even Doakes, could possibly object to his demise. If I had wondered casually about finding the Doctor before, now it began to take on an urgency that drove away my frustration with missing out on Reiker. So he was like me, was he? We would see about that. A jolt of something cold bristled up my spine and I found that I truly looked forward to meeting the Doctor and discussing his work in depth.

In the distance I heard the first rumble of thunder as the afternoon storm moved in. “Shit,” said Chutsky. “Is it going to rain?”

“Every day at this time,” I said.

“That’s no good,” he said. “We gotta do something before it rains. You’re up, Dexter.”

“Me?” I said, startled out of my meditations on maverick medical malpractice. I had adjusted to going along for the ride, but to actually have to do something was a little more than I had bargained for. I mean, here we had two hardened warriors sitting idly by, while we sent Delicate Dimpled Dexter into danger? Where’s the sense in that?

“You,” Chutsky said. “I need to hang back and see what happens. If it’s him, I can take him out better. And Debbie-” He smiled at her, even though she seemed to be scowling at him. “Debbie is too much of a cop. She walks like a cop, she stares like a cop, and she might try to write him a ticket. He’d make her from a mile away. So it’s you, Dex.”

“It’s me doing what?” I asked, and I admit that I was still feeling some righteous indignation.

“Just walk by the house one time, around the cul-de-sac and back. Keep your eyes and ears open, but don’t be too obvious.”

“I don’t know how to be obvious,” I said.

“Great. Then this should be a piece of cake.”

It was clear that neither logic nor completely justified irritation was going to do any good, so I opened the door and got out, but I couldn’t resist a parting shot. I leaned in Deborah’s window and said, “I hope I live to regret this.” And very obligingly, the thunder rumbled again nearby.

I strolled down the sidewalk toward the house. There were leaves underfoot, a couple of crushed juice cartons from some kid’s lunch box. A cat rushed out onto a lawn as I passed and sat down very suddenly to lick its paws and stare at me from a safe distance.

At the house with all the cars in front the music changed and someone yelled, “Whoo!” It was nice to know that somebody was having a good time while I strolled into mortal danger.

I turned left and began to walk the curve around the cul-de-sac. I glanced at the house with the van in front, feeling very proud of the completely nonobvious way I pulled it off. The lawn was shaggy and there were several soggy newspapers in the driveway. There didn’t seem to be any visible pile of discarded body parts, and no one rushed out and tried to kill me. But as I passed by I could hear a TV blaring a game show in Spanish. A male voice rose above the hysterical announcer’s and a dish clattered. And as a puff of wind brought the first large and hard raindrops, it also carried the smell of ammonia from the house.

I continued on past the house and back to the car. A few more drops of rain pelted down and a rumble of thunder rolled by, but the downpour held off. I climbed back into the car. “Nothing terribly sinister,” I reported. “The lawn needs mowing and there’s a smell of ammonia. Voices in the house. Either he talks to himself or there’s more than one of him.”

“Ammonia,” Kyle said.

“Yes, I think so,” I said. “Probably just cleaning supplies.”

Kyle shook his head. “Cleaning services don’t use ammonia, the smell’s too strong. But I know who does.”

“Who?” Deborah demanded.

He grinned at her. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and got out of the car.

“Kyle!” Deborah said, but he just waved a hand and walked right up to the front door of the house. “Shit,” Deborah muttered as he knocked and stood glancing up at the dark clouds of the approaching storm.

The front door opened. A short and stocky man with a dark complexion and black hair falling over his forehead stared out. Chutsky said something to him and for a moment neither of them moved. The small man looked up the street, then at Kyle. Kyle slowly pulled a hand from his pocket and showed the dark man something-money? The man looked at whatever it was, looked at Chutsky again, and then held the door open. Chutsky went in. The door slammed shut.

“Shit,” Deborah said again. She chewed on a fingernail, a habit I hadn’t seen from her since she was a teenager. Apparently it tasted good, because when it was gone she started on another. She was on her third fingernail when the door to the little house opened and Chutsky came back out, smiling and waving. The door closed and he disappeared behind a wall of water as the clouds finally opened wide. He came pounding up the street to the car and slid into the front seat, dripping wet.

“GodDAMN!” he said. “I’m totally soaked!”

“What the fuck was that all about?” Deborah demanded.

Chutsky cocked an eyebrow at me and pushed the hair off his forehead. “Don’t she talk elegant?” he said.

“Kyle, goddamn it,” she said.

“The smell of ammonia,” he said. “No surgical use, and no commercial cleaning crew would use it.”

“We did this already,” Deborah snapped.

He smiled. “But ammonia IS used for cooking methamphetamine,” he said. “Which turns out to be what these guys are doing.”

“You just walked right into a meth kitchen?” Deb said. “What the hell did you do in there?”

He smiled and pulled a Baggie out of his pocket. “Bought an ounce of meth,” he said.